This invention relates to energy monitors and particularly to watt-hour meters.
Power companies generally use watt-hour meters to monitor the energy consumption in homes and businesses. Frequently a single watt-hour meter monitors the energy consumption of all the business tenants in a shopping center or the like and all the residential tenants of an apartment building. It is essential that such watt-hour meters be extremely accurate because charges are based upon the readouts of such meter devices. The owner or manager of the shopping mall or residential apartment normally pays for the entire energy consumption of all the tenants. The tenants are charged a flat fee which is included as part of their respective rents. However, some tenants consume portionally more energy than others. Thus, with rising fuel costs, owners, managers, and tenants who utilize only minimum quantities of energy wish to proportion the costs within any shopping center or apartment building on the basis of use. The cost of installing existing watt-hour meters for convenient reading is at the present time very expensive.